PhD students in Denmark – who are we, and how are we doing?

PAND – the PhD Association Network of Denmark, together with DM, runs a PhD work life survey every second year. Last year, our latest survey has provided us with a lot of interesting and useful information about the working conditions, well-being and motivation of doctoral students.

In 2020, there were a total of 9529 PhD students in Denmark, with roughly 16% of them participating in this extensive survey, which was shared in April and May of 2021. In the next weeks, we will share some data on selected topics, to give you all an idea of the experience of PhD students about work, well-being and the challenges of life as doctoral student.

But before we delve into the specific topics, it is interesting to take a look at the demographic division of our respondents:

In more traditional demographic terms, the respondents of our survey are fairly balanced, skewering slightly towards women rather than men, and below 30- rather than older, but with a considerable majority being childless.

When it comes to the status of their studies, there is a fairly good distribution between first, second and third-year PhDs, and a distribution between the Universities that is mostly corresponding to the number of students overall.